In a current communications system, a base station and user equipment (UE) perform information communication on a carrier. A frequency width of the carrier (carrier bandwidth for short) may be referred to as a channel bandwidth or a transmission bandwidth or a system bandwidth or a bandwidth. For UE having a normal capability, the UE may receive data within an entire system bandwidth.
In communication on the Internet of Things, various devices having specified sensing, computation, execution, and communication capabilities are deployed, and a network is used to implement information transmission, coordination, and processing functions, thereby implementing interconnections between people and things and between things. To reduce a cost, low-complexity (and/or low-cost, and/or low-power-consumption, and/or coverage-enhanced) UE is particularly suitable for communication on Internet of Things or machine type communication (MTC).
However, low-complexity UE can send or receive only data and/or control information within an operating bandwidth (the operating bandwidth is less than a carrier bandwidth, for example, the bandwidth is 20 MHz, and the operating bandwidth is 200 KHz, 1.4 MHz, 3 MHz, 5 MHz, or the like) on a carrier, and the low-complexity UE cannot know which part of operating bandwidth in the bandwidth is a bandwidth used to transmit data and/or control information. Therefore, communication between the low-complexity UE and a base station is impeded.